At the end of the third day of the trial, only one question remains: what are we even doing here? Today the court heard the prosecution’s key witnesses, including the main one—the very director of Kirovles on whose testimony the entire case is built. The court’s website is streaming the proceedings live, so the internet is full of funny images that very accurately capture what happened today. Opalev has been nicknamed “Mr. Facepalm,” and he really did spend most of the day like this:
demotivator meme
His questioning was very funny. Malgin described it perfectly. Even during the prosecution’s examination, he started getting confused about key parts of his testimony. The prosecutors, realizing their man was about to drift so far off course that he might never come back, demanded that his written testimony be read out BEFORE our side began questioning him. Basically: let’s read it aloud and remind the gentleman what he’s supposed to say. The judge granted their motion despite our objections, after which they read out his testimony THREE times (formally these were three different interview records, but each one repeated the same text word for word). To be fair, it didn’t help much, and when Opalev was handed over to us for cross-examination, his answers most often sounded like, “I don’t know how to answer that question correctly,” and “everything happened the way it says in the recOrd” (preserving his stressed pronunciation). Here’s a funny TV Rain report about it: http://tvrain.ru/articles/ja_ne_pomnju_kljuchevaja_fraza_segodnjashnego_doprosa_svidetelja_opaleva-342016/ Overall, the witnesses’ testimony can be summed up like this: NOT A SINGLE witness testified to any FREE TRANSFER OF TIMBER. ALL the witnesses testified that the goods were paid for. everyone questioned, including the auditor, acknowledged that VLK’s share of Kirovles’s total sales was insignificant, and that VLK’s share of the accounts receivable (which, according to testimony from those same witnesses, was somewhere between 130 and 200 million rubles) was also insignificant (3 million rubles). the only witness claiming that “VLK acted on Navalny’s behalf” is Opalev himself. Another witness making a similar claim—Opalev’s daughter—points to him as her sole source of information. That’s how it is. I’ll repeat: these are the prosecution’s key witnesses.
(photo from here) Chronicles of today’s hearing: http://rapsinews.ru/judicial_analyst/20130425/267156833.html http://www.novayagazeta.ru/news/64469.html http://www.gazeta.ru/politics/2013/04/24_a_5279357.shtml http://www.svoboda.org/content/article/24967821.html I can’t imagine how they’re going to keep proving this Putin-Bastrykin nonsense.